Kucinich on electronic waste
From the campaign's issues page on Electronic Waste:
Electronic waste, or e-waste, represents the broad and growing range of electronic devices produced mainly in the last two decades as an inevitable by-product of the Information or High-Tech Revolution. From cell phones and video games to televisions and computer equipment, e-waste is now the fastest growing waste stream in the industrialized world, produced by the world's largest growing manufacturing industry: electronics. Experts believe that by the year 2004, over 315 million computers will become obsolete, leaving approximately 1.2 billion pounds of lead, 2 millions pounds of cadmium, and 4 billion pounds of plastics in the waste stream.
Dennis Kucinich will work to bring electronic waste to the forefront of environmental issues, through increased education, strengthening of environmental laws, and emphasis on corporate responsibility. Due to a lack of consumer education and awareness, most people scarcely stop to wonder what happens to their old computers once they are done using them, or how they should best discard them in the first place -- hence, the widespread solution of closet and garage storage. If current conditions persist, this electronic waste stream will more than likely flow in the direction of landfills, incinerators, or overseas exports.
While CRTs, computer towers, televisions, and other electronic equipment are known to contain numerous toxic substances, they are scarcely designed in ways that will ensure proper management. Landfills, incinerators, and even most modern recycling plants are not secure solutions to managing e-waste. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, over 3.2 million tons of e-waste ended up in national landfills in 1997. This is an insufficient and dangerous method of management, as both landfill and incinerators significantly contribute to rising problems in land, water, and air contamination. Even the best "state of the art" landfill is not completely secure, allowing certain amounts of chemical and metal leaching to occur. Electronic discards contribute to about 70% of heavy metals (primarily mercury and cadmium) found in landfills. These and other hazardous substances can severely contaminate groundwater and consequently filter into public water supplies and the food chain. Beyond problems of leaching in landfills, the vaporization of metallic mercury and dimethylene mercury is also of great concern. Furthermore, uncontrolled fires may arise in landfills, releasing extremely toxic dioxins and furans (dioxin-like compounds) into the atmosphere.
Most efforts to divert e-waste from landfills and incinerators result in hazardous dismantling, shredding, burning, exporting, and other unsafe, irresponsible disposal methods. Due to unchecked market forces and scarce economic incentives to do otherwise, the vast majority of e-waste -- a shocking 80% -- that is supposedly recycled is actually shipped overseas to poor countries. Rich, industrialized countries have made convenient use of the word "recycling" to justify the free trading of hazardous wastes to the developing countries of Asia, where labor is cheap and health and environmental restrictions are lax.
Investigative reports of these overseas "recycling" destinations have described horrifying working conditions and extreme environmental degradation. Unprotected workers -- many of them women and children -- spend long days dismantling equipment, mostly with the help of low-tech tools such as hammers, chisels, screwdrivers, and bare hands. Hazardous recycling operations such as toner sweeping, open burning, CRT cracking and dumping, and acid stripping of chips expose workers to deadly pollutants like chlorinated dioxins and furans that contaminate their bodies and their environment. Local drinking water has deteriorated to the point that supplies must be trucked in daily on rickety tractors from ten miles away. Near a riverbank that has been used to break down and burn circuit boards, a water sample revealed levels of lead 190 times as high as the drinking water standard set by the World Health Organization, while samples from the sediment displayed levels of lead and other heavy metals like barium and chromium hundreds of times as high as U.S. and European environmental standards for acceptable risk.
The power to change lies largely in the hands of developed countries. Dennis Kucinich will make sure this power is realized and addressed in the United States. While other governments are developing environmental guidelines for the preceding Info-Tech Revolution, the U.S. continues to lag behind and even regress. Beyond refusing to sign the Basel Convention, which aims to curb the unwarranted effects of free trade in toxic wastes, both the U.S. government and American manufacturers have made numerous efforts to challenge recent European Union initiatives, under the framework of the World Trade Organization (WTO).
As President, Dennis Kucinich will mobilize the U.S. to sign the Basel Convention and adopt policies of corporate responsibility, to ensure that toxic waste from the United States is no longer dumped on developing countries with scarce resources to handle it safely.
The United States must adopt a whole-systems approach to the e-waste problem in order to profit from remanufacturing, as the EU has recently done in their regional Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) Initiative. The electronic industries can no longer deny the rampant resource consumption and waste generation that plagues the Information Age, while simultaneously benefiting from their failure to claim responsibility for it. As the most rapidly escalating waste problem in the world, the e-waste dilemma represents both a call to producers to extend their responsibilities and the rumblings of an environmental crisis that has only just begun.
A Kucinich Administration will work to transform the U.S. into a closed-loop system, where products enter and exit the market through the same open doors. This way, obsolete products will no longer end up in a dangerous heap at the end of their lives.
The system through which the e-waste problem thrives requires a systemic solution that will work in the best interests of all stakeholders, and not just those at certain locations in the network. Manufacturers must take initial responsibility for creating this whole-systems approach, thus discovering new ways to profit from remanufacturing. From producers to governments to average consumers, stakeholders in the e-waste crisis must recognize together both the environmental and economic value of sustainability in the ensuing Info-Tech Revolution.
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